www.ijifr.

com Volume 4 Issue 8 April 2017

International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research ISSN: 2347-1697

An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture

Mechatronics
Paper ID IJIFR/V4/ E8/ 011 Page No. 6986-6991 Subject Area
Engineering
Agriculture, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAVs), Quadrotor, Quadcopter,
Key Words
Microcontroller, RF transmission, Reception

1st Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna UG Students,

Department of Elec. & Comm. Engineering,
2nd Jeoor S. Siddharam P.E.S Modern College of Engineering,
Pune-Maharashtra
Assistant Professor,
Department of Elec. & Comm. Engineering,
3rd Rupali S. Chaudhari P.E.S Modern College of Engineering,
Pune-Maharashtra

Abstract
The use of pesticides and fertilizers in agriculture has vital importance for
crop yield. The traditional or conventional methods of irrigation like flood,
drip or sprinkler irrigation have their limitations. The solution for these
constraints was the basis of the development of smart irrigation system.
However, the hardware installation for the smart irrigation system uses
excess cultivated land. The remedy to this problem is the use of quadrotors.
The use of aircraft is increasing and has now become a common sight. This
task is carried out using these drones mainly because of their speed and
effective spraying. This paper describes the architecture of Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle (UAV), which is deployed to implement a control loop for
different techniques in agriculture where UAVs are instrumental in
spraying chemicals on crops.

I. INTRODUCTION
Agriculture is the key to the development of countries such as India, Japan, Israel, China
and others. Trading of agricultural products is a crucial part of the economy. A developed
agriculture employs a large number of people. Agriculture in India generates almost 52% of
total number of jobs available. It contributes a share of around 18.1% of the GDP[1]. Time
and need has surfaced to increase the productivity of farming to feed the ever-growing
population. The advent of technology might prove helpful in increasing productivity within
the stipulated time. Different techniques such as irrigation, use of pesticides and
determination of PH value of soil were developed to improve crop yields. Flood irrigation

This work is published under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License 6986

Copyright©IJIFR 2017
 ISSN: 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume - 4, Issue -8, April 2017
Continuous 44th Edition, Page No.: 6986-6991
was an ancient method of irrigating crops. However, half of the water provided wasted in
evaporation, infiltration of cultivated lands and transpiration. Too much wastage of water in
flood irrigation caused the development of drip and sprinkler irrigation. However, for these
techniques, salt deposition at the nozzle resulted in the blockage of the pipes. Moreover, the
use of fertilizers and pesticides was increased to improve the fertility of the land so as to
improve productivity. The manual spraying of fertilizers and pesticides can affect the
nervous system and can result in fatal diseases. The World Health Organisation (WHO)
statistics puts that there are more than 1 million pesticide cases every year. Out of these At
least 1 lakh deaths occur in the developing countries.[2]
The solution to these limitations has formed the basis for the development of smart
irrigation. Using smart irrigation one can irrigate the field, determine the PH value of the
soil, convey the status of the crop to the farmer through GPS. Effective agricultural methods
were developed using smart irrigation. However, the excessive area that the smart irrigation
consumes is chiefly used for hardware installations utilizing larger areas of cultivated land.
This limitation formed the basis for the development of the UAV.
UAV or unmanned aerial vehicle, as the name suggests, is an aircraft that does not require a
pilot to operate it. The plane is usually operated using a remote control from the ground. It is
also programmed to perform certain tasks using dynamic automation systems which the
operator on the ground just needs to monitor to prevent the untoward incident from
happening. A quadrotor or quadcopter is unique in the sense that the UAV performs Vertical
Take-Off and Landing(VTOL). The use of quadrotors has an advantage over conventional
helicopter because of its simple mechanical design. The main feature of an UAV is that
individual motor control stabilizes the UAV instead of cyclic control. It can be applied in
varied areas such as in military for rescue operations, in discovering mines and agriculture.

II. PREVIOUS WORKS

A. Design and control of quadrotor with application to autonomous flying: [3]

Figure 1: Design and control of quadrotor with application to autonomous flying.

The project done by S. Bouabdallah focuses on Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL)
system. It includes the specialized design of micro Quadrotor which is based on autonomous
control system named as OS4. He applied mathematical modeling techniques such as linear

Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna, Jeoor S. Siddharam, Rupali S.

Chaudhari :: An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture 6987
 ISSN: 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume - 4, Issue -8, April 2017
Continuous 44th Edition, Page No.: 6986-6991
or non-linear quadratic equations and/or inequations to design and simulate various
controllers in his project. The author has developed two different platforms in his thesis. The
first one is a ‘Quadrotor like test-bench’ with off-board data processing and power supply. It
was used to test control strategies but was only capable of testing up to 3DoF. The second
one, OS4, is a highly integrated Quadrotor with on-board data processing and power supply.
It has all the necessary sensors for autonomous operation. In design the controller for his
Miniature Flying Robots (MFR), five different controllers were developed to achieve the
objective. The first one, based on Lyapunov theory, was applied for attitude control. The
second and the third controllers are based on Proportional Integral Derivative (PID) and
Linear Quadratic (LQ) techniques. These functions were compared for attitude control. The
fourth and the fifth approaches use back-stepping and sliding-mode concepts that applied to
control attitude. Finally, back-stepping is enhanced with integral action and proposed as a
single tool to design attitude, altitude and position controllers.
B. A wireless multivariable control scheme for a quadrotor hovering robotic platform: [4]

Figure 2: Qx4 3D orientation and telemetry graphing application demonstration.

Some of Quadrotor researchers had a problem with a result of the difficulties of
controlled flight. Z. Al-khatib, J. Yu, H. G. Al-khakani, and S. Kombarji presented the
Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) concept to non-technical users by developing a hovering robotic
Quadrotor platform that communicates with the main workstation and a number of
controllers and peripherals. The main goal of this project is to develop an abstract flexible
autonomous robot according to different levels of control and provide users of different
backgrounds access to the functions they want to work with. The system used to connect the
platform QX4, workstations and controllers uses a wireless mesh network or commonly
known as Radio Frequency (RF) Zig Bee module. The casing of the Quadrotor is using
carbon fibers frame and at its center, it houses three microcontroller boards, ten proximity
sensors, and three 3-axes inertia sensors. To protect the Quadrotor, a circular shape is
created and was placed on propeller made out of foam and mesh wire to protect the vehicle
and its surroundings. The workstation is a set of software applications that was executed on
a PC and connected to the wireless mesh network. It acted as a controller of the vehicle and
provided the operator a simple set of buttons that will make the robot conduct an action such
as move forward and move backward. This was done for cases where manual control was
desired. It also allowed the operator to take control in cases where the platform behaved in
an abnormal way. The use of Wii Nunchuck as secondary manual controller gave the
operator more choice in the maneuverability of the Quadrotor. The other part of this

Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna, Jeoor S. Siddharam, Rupali S.

Chaudhari :: An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture 6988
 ISSN: 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume - 4, Issue -8, April 2017
Continuous 44th Edition, Page No.: 6986-6991
Quadrotor controller was the administrator panel that controlled the robot and the main
interface on the workstation. It was designed using Java as the cross development platform,
where the program was compiled on PC and execution was done on the host machine.

III. COMMERCIALLY AVAILABLE UAVs

Many companies were involved either individually or in collaboration for development
and enhancement of functions of quadrotors. Following are some commercial UAVs that are
instrumental for agriculture.
A. Japan’s Yamaha R50: [5]
Ministry of agriculture, forestry, and fishery of Japan had requested Yamaha to devise
an unmanned hover for agricultural use. Yamaha then developed the R-50. Later Yamaha
sky division Australia developed unmanned remote controlled helicopters for agriculture
use. These were named RMAX. Today there are approximately 2400 RMAX flying over
Japan and Australia. Primarily they were used for agriculture but later on, the design served
for other wide range of applications. For example in the year 2000, the drone was used for
observation over erupting volcano for Mt Use in Hokkaido Some important features of
Yamaha RMAX include its weight approximately 99 kg, 3.63m length, 1.08m height. The
load carrying capacity is approximately 28kg. However, because of the use of horizontally
opposed two-stroke engines, it is bulkier. To operate the Yamaha R50 the user must need a
CASA Operators’ certificate.

Figure 3: Yamaha R50

B. Agrion: [6]

Figure 4: Agrion

Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna, Jeoor S. Siddharam, Rupali S.

Chaudhari :: An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture 6989
 ISSN: 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume - 4, Issue -8, April 2017
Continuous 44th Edition, Page No.: 6986-6991
American company Agribotix developed a drone named Agrion instrumental for agricultural
pourposes. Compartive to Yamaha R50 it is less bulky, it is supported with DJI PHANTOM
3 Advanced for easy flying, it is powered with smart batteries of 480mAh. Agrion is a cost
effective technology.

IV. GENERAL BLOCK DIAGRAM OF UAV

Figure 5: Block Diagram Of Quadrotor

The basic block diagram for a simple quadrotor application is as shown in the figure. It
consists of RF/Zig-Bee transciever for transmittion and reception. In main circuit its task is
to receive signals from remote control. The quadrotor will be fuelled by lithium ion power
batteries (LiPo). The purpose behind preferring LiPo battery is primarily power outsourcing
which is higher than any other batteries like aluminium ion power batteries. Other
advantages are high mAh (milli-ampere-hour) rating which is sufficient enough to run a
small BLDC motor, and low discharging time. A low weight container attached with
container attached with a valve is put on boar of quad rotor. Opening of valve is controlled
by the use of ON/Off controller & closing switches of Remote control. Brushless DC motors
used for rotating propeller blades. 4 BLDC motors are used and evenly spaced around a
central fuselage. The speed of these motors will decide the altitude of flight of UAV. Two of
them will rotate clockwise and rest will rotate anticlockwise. This combination will be
decided by direction control switch of remote control. The geared motors are available in
market. DC motors require 12V power supply for their operation. Whereas microcontroller
provides only 5V output. Hence there is a need to step up this voltage. The ESC provides
various levels of voltages due to which process of shifting gears of DC motor takes place.

Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna, Jeoor S. Siddharam, Rupali S.

Chaudhari :: An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture 6990
 ISSN: 2347-1697
International Journal of Informative & Futuristic Research (IJIFR)
Volume - 4, Issue -8, April 2017
Continuous 44th Edition, Page No.: 6986-6991

V. CONCLUSION
Agriculture is the backbone of Indian economy. At present development of technology in
agriculture is important for better crop yield. Especially in country like India this is
important since 70 percent of the country’s population depends on agriculture. Numerous
trends were developed to enhance technology in agriculture like the flood, drip, sprinkler
and smart irrigation and smart agriculture. But these were used for irrigational purposes only
moreover they use most of the cultivated land.A remedy to this solution is to use an aircraft
mechanism to conduct agricultural activities. So, this project demonstrates the same. The
project develops a quadcopter as a fertilizer and pesticide sprinkler, controlled remotely.
The result is the functioning of the quadrotor according to the commands given by the
operator. The drone responds to the commands.

V. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This project was conducted using resources provided by P.E.S Modern College of
Engineering, Pune 411005. The support of Dr. Mrs. K.R Joshi, Principal, P.E.S Modern
College of Engineering, Prof. Mrs. R. S. Kamathe. Head of Department, Department of
Electronics and Telecommunication, Prof. Mrs. R. S. Chaudhari, Project Guide is
appreciated.

VI. REFERENCES
[1] M. G. Reddy, "Importance of agriculture in Indian economy: Some issues," PARIPEX- Indian
Journal of Research, Volume 4, Issue 1,, pp. 47-49, January 2015.
[2] D. R. M. N. G. G. S. S.Meivel, "Quadcopter UAV based fertilizer and pesticide spraying
system," International Academic Research Journal of Engineering Sciences, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 8-
12, February 2016.
[3] S. Bouabdallah, "Design and control of quadrotors with application to autonomous flying,"
IEEE/RSJ International conference on Intelligent robotics and systems, vol. 3727, october 2007.
[4] J. A.-K. S. K. Z.Al-Khatib, "A wireless multivariable control scheme for a quadrotor hovering
robotic platform using IEEE 802.15.4," Concordia University Canada, 2009.
[5] A. Sato, "The R-Max helicopter UAV.," YAMAHA MOTOR CO, LTD, Japan, Shizuoka,
september 2003..
[6] "Agribotix," YAMAHA MOTOR CO, LTD, [Online]. Available: http://agribotix.com/agrion/.
[Accessed 27 November 2016].

TO CITE THIS PAPER

Shrikrishna, A.J., Siddharam, S.J., Chaudhari, S.R. (2017) :: “An Overview of
Drone Based Agriculture” International Journal of Informative & Futuristic
Research (ISSN: 2347-1697), Vol. 4 No. (8), April 2017, pp. 6986-6991, Paper ID:
IJIFR/V4/E8/011.

Jawadekar A. Shrikrishna, Jeoor S. Siddharam, Rupali S.

Chaudhari :: An Overview of Drone Based Agriculture 6991